Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions

Abstract

The interpretation of forensic fingerprint evidence relies on the expertise of latent print examiners. The National Research Council of the National Academies and the legal and forensic sciences communities have called for research to measure the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners' decisions, a challenging and complex problem in need of systematic analysis. Our research is focused on the development of empirical approaches to studying this problem. Here, we report on the first large-scale study of the accuracy and reliability of latent print examiners' decisions, in which 169 latent print examiners each compared approximately 100 pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints from a pool of 744 pairs. The fingerprints were selected to include a range of attributes and quality encountered in forensic casework, and to be comparable to searches of an automated fingerprint identification system containing more than 58 million subjects. This study evaluated examiners on key decision points in the fingerprint examination process; procedures used operationally include additional safeguards designed to minimize errors. Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%. Independent examination of the same comparisons by different participants (analogous to blind verification) was found to detect all false positive errors and the majority of false negative errors in this study. Examiners frequently differed on whether fingerprints were suitable for reaching a conclusion.

Determining the order of deposition of natural latent fingerprints and laser printed ink using chemical mapping with secondary ion mass spectrometry

“…Until recently, long-used forensic science techniques have been employed to provide evidence in criminal trials without the reliability being questioned, however, high profile cases and publicised errors have resulted in an increased scrutiny of the discipline [6,7]. This is especially the case with latent fingerprint examination, where interpretation of fingerprint evidence is heavily dependent on the skill and expertise of latent print examiners [8].…”

A generative model for fingerprint minutiae

“…In forensics, minutiae in latent fingerprints are manually marked by latent examiners. However, different examiners may not always mark the same minutiae in a fingerprint [18]. Moreover, it is expensive, tedious, and error-prone to manually mark minutiae and ridge orientation field in a large number of rolled or slap fingerprints.…”

Likelihood Ratio as Weight of Forensic Evidence: A Closer Look

“…In particular, they promote the value of "black-box" studies [15] in which practitioners from a particular discipline assess constructed control cases where ground truth is known (to researchers, but not the participating practitioners) as surrogates for casework in order to evaluate the collective performance of the discipline. Although we are primarily focused on the use of likelihood ratios, which these reports only tangentially consider, the concerns identifed in this article also apply to subjectively selecting the pool of control scenarios required to estimate case-specifc error rates.…”